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Monday, 2 March 2015

Global Service Jam 2015 - my Edinburgh experience

The Global Service Jam took place on the last weekend in February, with Edinburgh consultants Nile kindly hosting a great weekend of collaborating and innovating that I was able to get involved in.

Service Design is a field I've been learning quite a bit about in the past year or so, and I was invited to participate in an annual worldwide event recently - the Global Service Jam.

Service Design and Experience consultants, Nile, hosted the Edinburgh event and it was a lot of fun, a great way to meet new people and to put our combined skills and experience into a project being undertaken simultaneously worldwide.

Host Andrew illustrating one of the fundamentals - more doing, less talking

Unfortunately due to family commitments I couldn't throw myself into the event totally - some people were involved days and evenings, Friday to Sunday - but from the full session Friday and popping in Saturday and Sunday, I got a really good feel for what was going on.

Basically, at over 100 locations worldwide, groups of people were getting together to "solve" a design problem. I say "solve" as the brief was incredibly open. It was really just an opportunity to collaborate, network, innovate and have fun. And our Edinburgh hosts Nile were incredibly generous, giving over their fantastic facilities in New Town.

So you can see, two very different outputs from the same initial concept brief. And if you explore the rest of the projects from across the world, you can see just how much creative talent was at work.

If you're wondering what this 'Service Design' lark is all about, here are a couple of starting points: